Book Review - One Step Too Far - Tina Seskis

Book Review – One Step Too Far – Tina Seskis

 

Recommended for: Adults/Young Adults who love a Mystery

 

(From the back cover) An apparently happy marriage. A beautiful son. A lovely home. So what makes identical twin Emily Coleman get up one morning and walk right out of her life to start all over again? How will she survive? And what is the date that looms, threatening to force her to confront her past?

No-one has ever guessed her secret. Will you?

Ooh, a challenge!

How exciting!

*reads furiously*

Is it…oh, no, that’s not it.

*reads furiously*

Aah, is it…no…

*reads furiously*

Must be…dammit!

*finishes book*

Oh…blimey.

 

One Step Too Far is a mystery story about a mother and wife, Emily, who ups and leaves one day for London, shortly after a tragic event. Alternating every chapter between the first person present and the third person past, we learn a bit more about Emily’s (now Cat) new life, and the circumstances that led to where she is, from a variety of viewpoints, including her husband, parents, twin sister Caroline, and friends. There are glorious highs and devastating lows, both in the present and in the past, all leading to the big reveal – just what tragedy caused her to flee?

With a blurb as enticing as this, you’re inevitably looking for clues right from the very beginning, and yet despite having read and seen twist after twist, I still didn’t figure it out, although I’ll be modest and declare that I was getting close to the right lines at different stages. The twist and reason for Emily/Cat’s disappearance is frightfully simple, but deliberately engineered so that we’re looking the wrong way – it’s easy for a twist to go too far into throwing us in the wrong direction, by making the twist ludicrous and implausible, but this is an excellent example of the reader having all the information there in front of them but assuming everything instead of being explicitly told.

Whilst everyone who is reading this is only doing so for the twist, if it wasn’t so well written with characters who you want to learn more about, it’d be easy to give up and skip to the end without bothering to read all the text. There’s no problem with that here though – Tina Seskis has managed to write about something perfectly ordinary in someone having to find a place to live and a job in London, and made it enjoyable enough that the book doesn’t have to rely on the twist along. Sure, there are hints dropped in there every so often to keep us guessing, the odd tantalising bit of information to make us think we’re on the track to discovering Emily/Cat’s secret, but I remained genuinely intrigued to see how Emily/Cat was going to cope with her new life. The flashbacks inevitably reminded me of Lost, piecing together the parts of Emily/Cat’s story and how different her life had been before the event that caused her to flee, and making her decision to leave all the more baffling – it really does make you rack your brains to think about what could possibly have happened.

Be prepared – when the twist is revealed, it really does come out of nowhere, misdirecting you right up until the last moment, and then leaving you a broken, emotional mess. I shouldn’t have finished this off on the bus, as I really did have to try hard to keep myself together.

The characters are all believable and the flashbacks leave you wanting to know more and more about all of them, although if I’m going to level a criticism at the book it’s that, whilst I genuinely enjoyed reading the background to all the characters and the circumstances that shape how they are, I’m not really convinced that all of it adds anything to the twist, which their role in the story is surely for. It’s very hard to write about anything without spoiling it, because this really is a story that you should read with as little info as possible, and I can certainly see how some of the flashbacks lead to how certain characters react as they approach the twist, but really they could all have been completely different characters and the same thing could still have happened. Having said that, knowing what we do from the flashbacks, the emotional punch is stronger.

That’s not to take away from the fact that I was gripped throughout, whether it was the present day or a flashback, and the more I learned about each character, the more intrigued I became. It seems unfathomable that a loving wife and mother could leave her seemingly idyllic life, and it’s hard to know whether or not to feel pity for her at times – she’s abandoned everyone she loves, but it’s obviously something terrible that has caused it. Who’s to say that we wouldn’t react the same to a tragedy?

Overall

One Step Too Far is a fantastic mystery, keeping you hooked throughout and desperate to learn what happened in the past, but also wanting to stick with the main character and see where her life heads. Go into it knowing as little as possible (beyond this review!) – it’s well worth it.

10/10